Escape from Tomorrow a Movie Review: The controversial film secretly filmed in the Disney parks: (Podcast included that discusses the film and other things Disney)

This strange movie came up during a discussion of films in the Geek Podcast I'm involved with.   I’m the big Disney fan of the group and was the only one that hadn’t seen it yet….So that and the Disney parks in general became the topic of our Podcast.

Escape from Tomorrow    7 out of 10 

The movie was secretly filmed at and in the Disney Resorts without Disney’s okay.   Disney choose not to bring action against the filmmakers, because they didn’t want to bring more attention to the film.  I believe this was a smart decision.  
So is this movie worth watching as a fan of Disney??? 
 I'll try to answer that question.

The plot of the movie is very strange:   It follows a family man on his last day of his family vacation to Disneyworld.     He wakes up to a phone call where he has been fired from his job…Needless to say he spends his day very distracted.    He is mesmerized by two young French girls (which is very creepy) and spends the day at the parks following the girls around with his son in tow.  He also seems to be having strange hallucinations where he sees evil faces on the dolls of the Small World. 

At one point his son gets sick after he makes him go on Space Mountain as he creepily follows these girls around.   The mom takes the son back to the hotel.   The dad takes the daughter around the park for awhile and then ends up hooking up with a strange women he meets on a bench.  The dad’s character is completely beyone redemption  at this point in the movie.  What the Bleep is he thinking?    The family meets back up at the hotel pool –where more creepy behavior by the dad happens.    They head back to the Epcot and more strangeness happens as the dad tries to drink his stress away.   The mom eventually starts acting strange as well and after getting angry at the daughter ends up heading back to the hotel again.  Now the film really goes into strange zone as the dad loses the daughter and ends up taken to some strange underground lab inside Spaceship Earth.      There is an even stranger ending to the film that leaves you wondering what was real and what wasn’t .   It would probably have given a 6 out of 10 ---but the fact that they had the balls to film in the parks –it gets a 7 out of 10.

 

The Disney Footage:

As a huge Disney fan I was expecting to just be upset by the film that was shot in the parks without permission.   That is probably why I hadn’t seen it before.  That ended up not bothering me. 

What did bug me was seeing footage that was supposed to be at Disneyworld ---that I knew was shot in Disneyland.    Watching the dad sitting at a bench with the Nemo Subs behind him while watching his daughter play in a completely different part of the park took me completely out of the film.  Instead of following the story –I was thinking about which park they were in every time I saw Disneyland on the screen –knowing they were supposed to be in Disneyworld.

My favorite part of the movie was the part with the secret underground lab under Spaceship Earth –that brief part of the story was interesting and could have lead down a much more interesting path along the lines of the movie Tomorrowland.

Other than the comment about Disney Princesses being high paid call girls for Japanese businessmen…the film really wasn’t negative towards Disney.  The Disney parks were really just the setting for the strange movie.  

The Verdict

So is it worth watching as Disney Fan? 

 For an adult Disney fan….Yes I think it is worth giving a watch if only for the rare footage of a movie being filmed in the parks.  The only filming you get to ever see inside the parks is on a random ABC TV show during sweeps week.

For younger Disney fans:   Skip it.  The film has adult themes and some nudity and isn’t really for younger viewers.   Definitely not one for small kids.  If young kids see this they may never want to go on the Small World again

Here is a link to the Podcast in which we discuss the movie, the plethora of Star Wars stuff coming to Disneyland and more Disney subjects.

 http://shoutengine.com/TheSuperFantasticTerrificShow/super-fantastic-terrific-show-9-escape-from-tom-12512

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